Are East African pastoralists truly conservationists? / Comments / Reply

Central to the debate over whether the concept of the "ecologically noble savage" is a myth are the problem of how to identify conservationist behavior and the issue of whether sound management of common property is likely to evolve. Ruttan et al take a game-theoretical approach to analyze the case of pastoralist grazing reserves and demonstrate that under some conditions conservation can be the result of narrow self-interest and there is no collective-action problem.